I was thinking the other day about my great-uncle Jim, who was married to my great-aunt Jeanette. What a character. He was 60 when he married Jeanette, who was well past 50 if she was a day.
The family scandal was that she only married Jim because she discovered her sister had her cap set on old Bishop Wilkinson, and if Daisy were the first sister to marry at the 61-year mark, she would inherit the family silver.
So Jeanette nipped Daisy at the last fence and shot across the finish line, dragooning the usually very stuffy Mr. James Nicholson into marriage by whispered stories of sexual prowess that she had no intention of living up to, but that managed to unhinge the poor bachelor’s mind. My father doubted she had even been kissed, as she had a moustache like a grenadier.
Aunt Daisy rarely spoke to Aunt Jeanette again, nor did Uncle Jim, who maintained a bitter outlook on marriage and life after that. He hated the hard-won Smythe-Brown silver as well. Too ornate for his down-to-earth taste.
I was often dropped off at their mansion as a moist child because of my parents’ busy schedule. I would happily sit in Uncle Jim’s study, playing with a huge globe and rearranging his library books, which dealt primarily with birds and birdseed, as he owned an avian pet food company he had just sold to Hartz Mountain Pet Food in America. It enraged him that I played with his books, but I loved him for his eccentricities even at my early age.
For instance I recall him returning from the art gallery to which he had been dragged to see a display of French Impressionists in order to improve his art sense. He opened the door to his study in a fury.
“That Cezanne fellow wants shooting,” he shouted at me, which at five years old was quite a shock. “I don’t hold with Bolshies either,” he yelled down the stairs at the elderly French maid who had served him for some 30 years. She dropped a distant dish as a reply.
What has happened to all his types these days, people not afraid to say what they think, as wildly off base as it may be? I do miss them.
Uncle Jim had millions, which he gave to the British Merchant Marine Service, although we could find no answer as to why. I would be a wealthy man today if he had but passed it down to the next generations as is normally expected. Which probably means that I would not have to put up with my wife’s cats, as she holds the purse strings in our family. Blast.
Every night at dinner Uncle Jim would carve the small roast chicken as a surgeon would, thinly so that one could almost see through it, and then tell Aunt Jeanette that they would soon be in the poor house because of my eating habits.
I was very hungry at that age and so finished everything in sight, which alarmed him no end. He concluded that I must have Romanian blood in me because during a tour of the Slav countries as a young man, he recalled observing one chap eating a dead horse.
Aunt Jeanette would always say things like “Don’t upset your Uncle Jim” or “You know how your attitude brings on his dyspepsia” or “Please, Nigel, don’t creep about, it makes your uncle anxious.”
He occasionally would bellow at his wife, “Why is the boy always lurking?”
What did it mean? What was I to do?
I would often sit in the large, ornate grandfather clock near the entranceway of their house. I hid behind the pendulum and smiled stupidly at the boxer dog called Montcalm. One day my uncle came to the clock to check it with his waistcoat fob only to be met by the apparition of a small child with an otherworldly grimace on his face.
He immediately fainted, falling onto the innocent Montcalm, who was not prepared for that amount of weight descending from that height with no announcement whatsoever. Quite understandably and after some sturdy protest, he bit my uncle’s ear. This somewhat revived the large man, who wailed at his alarmed wife that there was an apparition in the clock and the dog had gone off his head. I was subsequently removed from their house, and when my father made no appearance in the will a few years later, I was given the blame.
Nevertheless, I think the world today could do with a few more characters like my great-uncle Jim. He died in his late 70s. The two sisters made it well into their 90s, still barely speaking to each other. A shame, really, but both were gaga anyway. Not sure where the family silver went. Perhaps the Bolshie maid took it. Good for her, eh?
Copyright Major’s Corner 2015
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